TOPIC: Genes
#16: Mus spretus and Mus domesticus look similar, but crosses between these two species of mouse fail to produce offspring because of a single genetic incompatibility. read more
#18: In an average meal, you eat around 150 000 km of DNA. read more
#14: Starfish are our distant cousins. Sea urchins and other echinoderms are the closest relatives of the vertebrates. read more
#52: Advances in nanotechnology have enabled the creation of miniature machine parts made from DNA. It might be possible to use these to fix faulty cells. read more
#51: In personalised medicine, therapy is tailored to a patient's genetic make-up. One example is the drug vemurafenib, which blocks a protein that tis mutated in over half of cases of melanoma. read more
#42: Human eggs are made in the embryo, so the egg cell that fused with a sperm to become you was actually produced around six months before your mum was born. read more
#35: Research has shown a strong relationship between the weight of children and the body mass of their biological parents but not between the weight of children and the body mass of their adoptive parents. read more
#20: It would take 9.5 years, non-stop, to read aloud a person's genome base by base. read more
#19: Losing a gene can be a good thing. A mutated caspase-12 gene has been selected for during human history; it may make us less likely to suffer from sepsis. read more
#15: Analysis of DNA from museum specimens revealed that the dodo was a type of pigeon. read more
